A couple of people have written reviews on some supplements. I am trying to avoid them, but I did find a glass of apple juice before bed helped me get into a Lucid Dream. I would just hate to find using a supplement that was supposed to be harmless end up causing damage to my brain, but that's more of a fear than a "anti supplement" stance.

Def let me know which ones give you success.

Also, if the brain doesn't exist, then it is only the mind that exists =) Which is what I believe some philosophers say is the truth. That our mind is a mind within "the great' mind that could be referred to as God. That there is no such thing as space and time, just the laws of the dream, just as when we experience our Lucid Dreams, the objects and people don't physically exist anywhere, we just perceive them as physical. The physical world is the lucid dream of God, and we are simply parts of God. Much more plausible for me after experiencing a LD, but I figure I'll worry about figuring that stuff out when I am dead...that way if there is an afterlife I can figure that stuff out then, no point of worrying about it now =)

I dont like them either and have been known to put up with small headaches for months and wont even take a disprin or anything so was very reluctant but will now use one small lot about each 2 weeks. Also as far as putting stuff in out bodies I think our food production chain has dealt to any hope of pure food years ago

Who are you I asked, the reply "dont be silly, we are your daughers" many years before they were born

Yeah! That's what that "inkpoet" guy mentioned somewhere above. Man, wouldn't it be wild if good old apple juice was the best substance to use for lucid dreaming? I mean you can't get much healthier than that!

Peter wrote:I dont like them either

Yeah, I know what you mean. I tried cocktails of triptaphane and choline a while back, but it started to give me a very weird headache (coulda been psychosomatic, though), but anyway I gave all that stuff up. I *am* going to try brewing up a batch of mugwort tonight though, but it's probably going to take a while.

rdubya wrote:Also, if the brain doesn't exist, then it is only the mind that exists

Mmmm, well, again--only if you buy into Cartesian dualism (which most of us do whether we like it or not. It's just part of our "conceptual legacy"). Lucid dreaming is another one of those odd things (like quantum mechanics, which is best discussed via mathematics) that tests the limits of our "antiquated systems" (to borrow a phrase from Jack Nicholson's character in the old movie Easy Rider--funny scene, btw!). We need a better way to think and talk about all this stuff--but right now we're stuck with what we've got!

Oddly enough, though, you could think of Descartes as a type of starting point. One of his "meditations" in his Discourse on Method concerns how--if at all--you can tell if you're dreaming on not. Apparently, ol' Rene knew nothing about lucid dreaming! --but he doesn't answer the question adequately at all.

Believe it or not, Robert Waggoner's book is the source for all this speculation I'm doing. Right now I'm really into thinking about dream characters. How do we define "personhood" in the real world? Well, it usually has something to do with someone acting with some kind of autonomy, right? But I've had lucid dreams where characters acted incredibly autonomous. So, can you conclude that, in some odd sense, these dream characters have personhood? Should they be respected somehow? Do the in some way have "rights"?

Personally, and in an odd way, I'd like to think so. But what about those occasions where your significant other is raving mad at you in the morning because "you" were acting like a jerk in her/his dream!? "Honest, honey--that was *not* me!" And here the snake starts to eat its own tail...

rdubya wrote:That there is no such thing as space and time

If that's the case, then we are alive, we have always been alive, and we always will be alive. On the other hand, we're dead, we've always been dead, and we always will be dead--all at the same time. I'm not in the least prepared to say this is so, but it might be one of the things our dreams are trying to tell us--and ultimately it's again pointing towards the limits of our language and current philosphical conceptions.

rdubya wrote:I'll worry about figuring that stuff out when I am dead

Given that there's no space and time then, what makes you think that, at least in some sense, you're not already "dead" ?

We are dead and we are alive at the same time - why not. We dream and we control PART of the dream - something else dreams and controls PART of the dream, so a LD is an interface between 2 forms of awareness that are dreaming at the same time or in the same space - well why not

Peter

Who are you I asked, the reply "dont be silly, we are your daughers" many years before they were born

Peter wrote:We are dead and we are alive at the same time - why not. We dream and we control PART of the dream - something else dreams and controls PART of the dream, so a LD is an interface between 2 forms of awareness that are dreaming at the same time or in the same space - well why not Peter

Nice, Peter. That's well put.

It's probably no surprise by now that I'm somewhat of a fan of the Irish writer James Joyce, who of course penned the "novel" Finnegans Wake--which is about not only dreaming, but sleeping and the entire nocturnal experience. (I mistyped the title when I was creating my username, btw--doh! Idiot!).

Anyway, it's--to say the least--a difficult book to "read" in any normal sense of the word (if you're not quite sure what I mean, pick up a copy, turn to any random page and try reading it. It's like getting hit with 300 ugs of microdot). As a result, readers of this work (and Joyce in general) tend to collect a lot of secondary source material--critical analyses and the like.

One of my favorites of these is by a guy who teaches literature at UC Berkeley named John Bishop. Back in the 80s he wrote this fantastic, playful, fun to read book on Finnegans Wake called Joyce's Book of the Dark. And in it he discusses how dreaming (the whole gamut of sleeping actually) is the closest experience we have to death--and we have this experience every night. There's an entire chapter, for example, on the Egyptian Book of the Dead (which Joyce used extensively as source material). But there are also great speculations as well into what happens to the self, what happens to memory (which Joyce respells "m'm'ry" (memory with holes in it)--indeed what happens to "you" during the night.

Because of the way it's written, Finnegans Wake also presents us with a radically different concept of language. The language of the "Wake" is a polyglot of more or less all the languages that exist on earth (and some that no longer exist), and Joyce employed multi-linguistic "puns" throughout to convey, not double-entendres, by multi-entendres that can and often do span a number of different languages at the same time. Ultimately Joyce's novel offers up a completely different and radical way to look at and use language--but again, that language is couched within the language of sleeping and, in particular, dreaming (as a matter of fact, a number of my lucid dreaming experiences have been what I can only call, well, "Wakean").

I bring all this up just to mention that this is what's been driving a lot of these questions I've been asking here.